Author
Topic: Hunhh?? (Read 1917 times)

I've been planning to pick up a digital scale, and ran across a blurb for this one recently. Haven't heard of the company before, but the specs look pretty good. What baffles me is the statement:

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A simple press of a button lets you measure either liquid or dry ingredients.

I must have skipped class the day they covered this way back there in high school chemistry or physics or wherever the heck it was covered in, but if you're weighing ingredients, as opposed to measuring by volume, why the heck would it make a difference if they're liquid as opposed to dry? (Yes, I'm aware that a liquid ounce is not the same thing as mass ounce, which is why 1 liquid oz of water weighs in at 1.042 oz. (avdp), but unless there's some screwy physics I'm not aware of, an ounce of mass is an ounce of mass is an ounce of mass, irrespective of the physical state (solid, liquid, gas) of the substance whose mass is being measured.)

Specific gravity is the variance. I believe. As an example, I just tried using some Suprema tomatoe puree from Sysco Foods which has a specific gravity of 1.06 and this stuff is soo heavy you wouldn't believe it.

I don't know the real answer as I do most of my cooking by feel and it turns out great.

Specific gravity is the variance. I believe. As an example, I just tried using some Suprema tomatoe puree from Sysco Foods which has a specific gravity of 1.06 and this stuff is soo heavy you wouldn't believe it.

Why would specific gravity have anything to do with it?

Specific gravity is the ratio of the density of a material to the density of water; in other words, it's a measure of the mass/unit volume of a material vs. the mass/unit volume of water. If you're weighing ingredients, volume is irrelevant: ice has a lower specific gracity than water, so 1 cubic cm of ice weighs less than 1 cubic cm of water, but 1 gram of ice is identical to the weight of 1 gram of water.

Do you think they are referring to the tare feature but didn't state it all that clearly?

That's a good question, Pete-zza. I guess I don't really see a connection between the tare function and weighing liquids as opposed to solids. Seems to me if you're going to weigh, say, 16 oz of flour, you'd want to have some sort of container on the scale to hold the flour so it didn't end up all over the floor when you picked up the scale to dump it into the mixing bowl , so you'd be using the tare function anyway.

Oh well, maybe I'll e-mail their customer service to see what the story is.